Judge lets Reddit pursue key claims in Perplexity data-scraping suit
By Blake Brittain
July 31 (Reuters) - A Manhattan federal judge on Friday rejected most of Perplexity AI's bid to dismiss a lawsuit brought by Reddit accusing it of violating U.S. copyright law by scraping the online discussion platform's data to train Perplexity's AI-powered search engine.
U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer said in his decision that Reddit could continue pressing its claims that Perplexity and three data scrapers unlawfully circumvented protective measures to steal content for AI training.
Among other things, Engelmayer said that Reddit had standing to sue for Perplexity's alleged misuse of its users' content.
"Reddit’s suit claims the right to control access to public web pages it doesn't own, using a security tool it didn't build, on behalf of users it hasn't asked," a Perplexity spokesperson said. "We’re going to defend the open internet, and we’re going to win."
"Today’s ruling brings us one step closer to holding bad actors accountable," a Reddit spokesperson said. "Reddit supports responsible access to public content, but we oppose companies that bypass our protections, ignore our rules, and profit off our communities without permission."
The case is one of many filed by content owners including authors, music labels and news outlets against tech companies over the alleged misuse of copyrighted material to train AI systems. Reddit filed a separate data-scraping lawsuit against Anthropic last year that is still ongoing in California state court.
Reddit, which features thousands of interest-based "subreddit" web communities, said in the lawsuit against Perplexity that the platform is the most commonly cited source for AI-generated answers to user questions. It has licensed its content to Google, OpenAI and others for their AI training.
Reddit said that Lithuania-based Oxylabs, Russia-based AWMProxy and Texas-based SerpApi -- which it also sued -- scraped Reddit data from billions of search results without permission and that Perplexity, which does not have a license to Reddit content, worked with at least one of them to obtain its material.
SerpApi attorney Jeff Homrig of Weil Gotshal & Manges said in a statement that the company "accesses public search results, not Reddit’s platform, and public information does not become protected because a platform wants to charge for it." Spokespeople for Oxylabs did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and AWMProxy could not immediately be reached for comment.
Reddit asked the court for unspecified monetary damages and an order blocking Perplexity from using its data. Perplexity has denied the allegations.
Engelmayer on Friday dismissed some of Reddit's secondary claims, but advanced its claims that Perplexity unlawfully scraped its data and engaged in a conspiracy with the data-scraping companies.
The case is Reddit Inc v. SerpApi LLC, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, No. 1:25-cv-08736.
For Reddit: Reid Bolton, Matthew Ford and William Gohl of Bartlit Beck
For Perplexity: Eric MacMichael, Sharif Jacob, Benjamin Rothstein and Christina Lee of Keker Van Nest & Peters
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